


Things That Are Green

by imdeadtiredTM



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Baby! Danielle "Dani" Fenton, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27126587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imdeadtiredTM/pseuds/imdeadtiredTM
Summary: "There’s a door with metal bolts that looks like a mouth for no other reason than the fact that it’s slightly ajar and hanging. Even at the doorway it reeks of ozone and smoke and it was cold as goosebumps prickled their arms. Sam and Tucker soften their steps as sweat drips to the floor. They both look at each other and they both knew. This was it. They get Danny or they don’t. They win or they don’t. No matter what happens, now is their best shot."Or, an alternative branch off to the episode Kindred Spirits.
Relationships: Danny Fenton & Tucker Foley & Sam Manson, Danny Fenton & Tucker Foley & Sam Manson & Danielle "Dani" Fenton
Comments: 5
Kudos: 54





	Things That Are Green

_"But someone still was yelling out and stumbling_

_And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—_

_Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,_

_As under a green sea, I saw him drowning._

_In all my dreams before my helpless sight,_

_He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."_

Dulce Et Decorum Est: By; Wilfred Owen

_4:40PM_

> _The shield shifted and swirled, looking like the ridges in fingerprints, something Danny never noticed before with his shield –_ Is he breathing? – _It looked like the sands lost in the wind or iridescence shimmer to the colors found when light reflected in bubbles and oil. It obscured Vlad’s lab with a green tint._

> _If he wasn’t carrying the bundle of white, he would’ve clawed at his throat. Covered his eyes. Kicked away. Something. Anything. All his muscles were tense. His throat tight, his form rigid. Distantly, Danny imagines his muscles pulling apart his spinal cord, the column in disarray like shattered porcelain. There was a cry and Danny loosened his white-knuckled grip, tried to be gentle. Tried to be careful._

> _His whole body jolted as if shocked when his back hit the wall. Unaware that he was walked backwards, scarcely aware of the fact that he was standing. His body jitters like the wreathing of an insect on its back and Danny sharply breathed in through his teeth, making a hissing sound like the steam escaping pipes. Remembering how delicate the bundle in his arms was: shakily, slowly, he lowered himself to the ground._

_5:00PM_

Sam and Tucker pass the stone archway and rush down the steps, footsteps echoing through the metal walls and the thuds echoing from the masterly carved stairs. Hearts pumping and with their arms and bodies pushing through the air; they run down the spiral staircase, and closer to the bright flashes of green, pink, and red that throbbed at the bottom. Mouths dry and skin clammy, they run because- _Danny has been missing for ten hours_. Because- _Vlad must’ve took Danny_. Because they- _have no one to ask for help if it all goes wrong_. Because they- _hacked the security and they have a thermos and a hide-a-way eco-gun, but they can’t fight him. Not with just these. Not without Danny_.

There’s a door with metal bolts that looks like a mouth for no other reason than the fact that it’s slightly ajar and hanging. Even at the doorway it reeks of ozone and smoke and it was cold as goosebumps prickled their arms. Sam and Tucker soften their steps as sweat drips to the floor. They both look at each other and they both knew. This was it. They get Danny or they don’t. They win or they don’t. No matter what happens, now is their best shot.

They clasp hands in that moment. Sam squeezes Tuckers hand and Tucker squeezes back, not daring to look at each other. Eyes steadfast at the sliver crack of light from the door, before they let go, palms and fingertips grazing, and Sam opens the door. Slowly. Soundlessly. Tucker with the thermos and Sam with the eco-gun.

When they open the door, nothing happens. The door doesn’t even creak. There isn’t a ball of green or pink light flung in their direction, there isn’t the sharp bang of a gunshot, or a madman’s crackle. A cage or a trap doesn’t just suddenly lower from the ceiling or rise from the ground at where they stand.

In fact, when the door opens all the way, there was no Vlad. There wasn’t much of anything left. The instant they walk in the ozone and cold intensifies. Scattered, torn, burned, singed and frost-covered pieces of scrap laid there like crumpled tissue paper. Glass shatters are sprinkled around, gleaming like morning dew. There are weird green goop-like splatters on the floor and walls. Then, there in the other side of the lab, against the wall and slumped to the ground, arms curling around a white lump of cloth, is Danny. His black hair sticking to his forehead, wet with sweat, and with his worn, torn shirt and blue jeans.

“Danny?” Says Sam.

“Danny!” Tucker calls out.

The heels of their feet pound against the floor as they leap over debris and as glass crunched under their boots. The closer they get to him the more they see. The green specks on the white cloth, the ring of cleanness around Danny and whatever he was carrying, the red puffiness in his eyes, and the stuttering of his chest.

“Hey. Hey, hey.” Tucker sooths as he kneeled, equally relieved and worried, lips tight and tense, when he clips the Thermos to his belt. As both hands cupped Danny’s face, he wiped the tears away with the pad of his thumbs. “We’re here man, we’re going to get you out of here.”

Sam kept her eyes on the door, and around the room, occasionally flickering her gaze to Danny’s mouth- in case blue mist started to teem and stood in front of them. Stance wide, muscles coiled like ropes of steel, the gun clicked as she turns the safety off. The lights flicker and unlike Danny, she can’t be seen in the dark.

“Where’s Vlad?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.” Despite the hyperventilating and the crying, Danny’s voice is even. Flat, even though it’s out of breath. It’s said so neutrally that for a moment neither Sam nor Tucker react, unable to process the words.

Even when he finally understands what he was told, Tucker doesn’t let go of Danny, or even flinch.

After she clicks the safety back on and when it’s in the pockets of her skirt, Sam lowers herself to the other side of Danny and leaned against the wall. Slowly, in the same way one would to a cornered animal. “How did he die?”

“I suffocated him with a ghost shield. Bubble? There was no oxygen. I didn’t know I could do that. Take the air away.” Again, Danny’s tone is dull. He doesn’t look at them and only looks at the floor.

“Not that I really care, but was it an accident?” Tucker said this casually as he still wiped away the tears and Danny leaned into his touch. Eyes blank.

Danny is still for a moment, as if thinking it over, slowly. Then he shakes his head slower still and in small range, bobbing side to side. “I didn’t- I didn’t know that the shield could even work like that. Suffocate him. But I saw him choke. I saw him gag, like he was drowning. He lunged, at first. It didn’t last long, but he kicked and clawed; red faced. I kept it up.”

It was quiet. The room a vacuum- as even the sound of each other breathing was canceled out in their ears.

“…Ok.” Sam said, “Ok, we can work with this.”

The bundle in Danny’s arms shuffles. Sam and Tucker’s vision zeroed onto the white, green-stained sheets that Danny cradled. Danny blinks- as a fraction of the fog clears from his eyes and he unveils a layer of thin fabric in a way that was almost uncertain and unfathomably careful – watching for spare grains of glass and dust – first seen is the black hair that swept across the forehead. The eyes are closed, a small fist curled to the side of the baby’s round face, and a small cut on her cheek that bled a drop of green. The baby could not had been older than six months.

“I didn’t want to get glass on her.” Danny says, as if that explained anything. And Vlad –” Danny’s body tenses and his words fumbled. “– Vlad needed my DNA. And he was – god. He was gonna kill a _fucking baby_. And –”

“Wait, wait.” Sam holds her hands up. “Why did he need your DNA? And why does he have a _baby_?”

“Also,” Tucker adds, “You’re holding her wrong.” At their stares he shrugs. “I have some baby cousins that I used to babysit, and I paid attention to Home Ec.” Tucker eyes the cuts and the slow oozing of blood on Danny’s arms. “Hand her over,”

Danny passes the baby over, and Tucker adjusts his grip, properly supporting her head this time. “I dunno,” Danny slump against the wall, arms resting on his legs and reached out, palms facing the ceiling. “Vlad didn’t really get a chance to monologue, not that he usually does. _Did_. He was just… he was going to kill her, really nonchalantly too, he wouldent of even blinked.” Danny’s voice got louder, and his eyes hardens. “He was going to kill her; he had the blanket to her face, and he was going to smother her to death. I broke out of the thing, the glass thing, I took her and we fought, he wasn’t going to stop.” Danny’s form quivered and his mouth almost forms a sneer. “He wasn’t going to stop.” He repeats. “He was just going to kill her. So, I –” Danny stops and swallows. “ – I buried him, down in the rock and cement, down in the foundations of the mansion, where no one is going to find him for a long, long time.”

“… Glass… thing?” Tucker asks.

“Yeah, this _thing_. I didnt know what it was, still don’t, but Vlad wanted me to transform in there. It was supposed to, uh, shock me until I did. I almost did.”

“ _Shit_.”

“Yeah,” Danny says, “I know. And all I know about the kid is that she’s not human.”

“Well,” Sam pauses a beat. “If Vlad’s dead in the one room with no surveillance and unrecorded in every blueprint published about his mansion, then we have all the time in the world to look through his stuff.”

All look at the room. To the left side of the lab was Vlad’s computer. A wide screen that took over almost the whole wall. Unlike the rest of the damage, it remained largely untouched except for the few hanging wires and a glitching hologram that never quite took form. “Voice command and the, uh, hologram are out of commission,” Says Danny, “but I think everything else works.”

Tucker looks at the computer and the keyboard in the furthest left corner. He shifts the baby under one arm and pushes up his glasses. “Only one way to find out.”

_6:04PM_

Vlad would buy all the best tech and gadgets in the world, and he knew how to use them. The only thing that gave Tucker any edge in maneuvering around that was that Vlad was as creative as a brick. Only power and no finesse, all it took for Tucker to get in was, by simply guessing on the first try, that the first password for the computer log in screen is, embarrassingly, ‘Password’. From there Danny was able to guess that the other passwords for files and accounts was ‘MaddieMasters’. One arm holding the baby and the other reaching out and furiously typing, eyes scanning line after line of codes, both computer-wise and cyphers with the screen reflecting onto his glasses. Line after line, Tucker would read the translations.

There were three others, before the baby that Tucker was holding. Labeled neatly, they were: DAN001, DAN002, DAN003. In a clean chart, in orderly boxes, there were descriptions, and then the word: EXPIRED in red, right at the end. Even for the baby Tucker was holding, who was labeled DAN004. The chart for DAN005 was incomplete. In fact, they only knew that DAN004 was the one Tucker was holing because it was the only one labeled: FEMALE.

DAN001 was barely more than bones. Described with ‘black arteries’ attached to the bones and a thin layer of skin at the stomach. Was ‘alive’ for five minutes. Vlad did not go into detail on if he killed DAN001 or if DAN001 died without Vlad’s help. DAN002 was big and misshaped. That one lived for two weeks. DAN003 was able to shrink and grow in size, that was what Vlad studied and focused on the most. DAN003 lived for a month and a half.

The more they read the colder the room became.

It the descriptions, there are links to articles about clones and the cloning process. About chromosomes and DNA. Links, notes, discoveries to Danny’s DNA. Descriptions about how he acquired them. Pictures. Highlighted sentences and margins. ‘bases?’: adenine? (A), cytosine? ©, guanine? (G) and thymine? (T). RNA, and structure. Pages of sources. Pages of book references. Whatever wasn’t typed down, Sam, Tucker, and Danny figured out pretty easily. Vlad is not a creative man. Was.

For a moment, they all just sat there. Staring blankly at the screen.

“… So not only did he clone Danny,” Sam’s voice was frigid, and a dark expression carves into her face. “gather bits of his hair, nails, and blood for who knows how long. Oh no. He killed babies. Plural. Because they weren’t perfect clones. He was going to kill a baby, because she would live fourteen years less than Danny and was the wrong gender. Because she was not a perfect clone.”

“And she was evidence he didn’t want.” Danny adds with bite, his face is a pasty white and his skin was clammy under the florescent lights, shifting uncomfortably and body rigid.

Once more the lab becomes uncomfortably cold and the air goes stale in their mouths. Cold prickled their arms and the back of their necks as nausea settled in the back of their throats and the pit of their stomachs.

Turning off the screen, Tucker leans back on his seat. Brows furrowed and eyes unsure. “What are we going to do with a baby?”

The other two remain quiet.

“We can’t just but her up to adoption. I mean, c’mon man she bleeds _green blood_. It would, at one point or another, get the GIW’s attention or some other ghost hunters or paranormal investigators then, bam. People that are half ghosts are possible. On record. And Danny’s secret in threatened. Both end up in a lab, no win scenario.”

Sam’s lips tighten and her arms cross, deep in thought. “Maybe we can hide her.”

Tucker’s frown deepens. “Hide her? Hide her _where_?”

“The Ghost Zone, maybe?” Danny offers. “Maybe we can get someone to take her in –”

“In the _Ghost Zone_!?” Both of Tuckers brows fly up in incredulously. “The Ghost Zone. Where there is no water or food that isn’t contaminated with ectoplasm, which, by the way, is technically radioactive and nobody knows the long-term effects. Never mind that our most reliable, mature, _responsible_ allies have been dead for at least a millennium and wouldent even know how to feed themselves if they had to. Ghost Zone is out. Hide her in our homes? How long are we going to do that? Who would watch her when we go to school? Because we sure as hell can’t just stuff her in a closet and cross our fingers. Then what? Ask our parents to watch a mystery baby every day? No questions asked? How long would _that_ last?”

“That would leave telling my parents. And I- god.” Danny pulls at his hair. “They threaten to dissect me and have – fucking – _lively conversations_ at the dinner table about what my anatomy would look like. I’m their kid, and I don’t know if they would view me as such anymore if they knew. I genuinely don’t know if she would be safe at my house.”

“That would leave running away.”

Tucker flinches and Danny freezes.

“No, hear me out,” Sam says, “ Here is the best case scenario if Danny tells his parents: Danny doesn’t have to keep a secret identity anymore, can explain more-or-less everything, and the baby gets to be raised by kinda normal, loving parents. Surrounded by supportive people, where if she has ghost powers or health issues, she’d be with the most experienced people in the world on ghostly matters and she’ll grow up to be as normal and as well taken care of as a clone baby with possible super powers could be. Hurrah.”

“Worst case scenario?” Sam continues, “We’re hunted down across the globe. Maddie and Jack Fenton work with the GIW and-slash-or any other paranormal, ghost hunting investigator. They’ll know about Danny’s abilities, so they have the proper hunting materials and expectations. They’ll know all of it. Why ghost shield doesn’t work, that ecto-weapons _do_ and with both forms. Maybe they would even figure out and get their hands on, or recreate, the Fenton boomerang, which can even follow him when he _time travels_. Worst part? The house always wins; we’d have to elude them every time and they just have to catch us once.”

“Us?” Danny says quietly. “It can’t be _us_. You two… you two got lives to lead. She is my clone and has my powers. I saved her and I killed Vlad to do it. I should go.”

“ _Hell_ no.” Sam and Tucker say this in near perfect unison.

“Danny,” Tucker says, “No offence, but there is no way you can do this by yourself.”

“Ok,” Danny stresses, “But I’m not about to weigh you both down because of my _stupid-crazy_ life.”

“Look,” Sam says, “If that was really the case then me and Tucker would’ve left your sorry ass on your own a long time ago. We don’t do this because we pity you, or because we think we have to do it because you’re our friend. We do it, because it’s the right thing to do. And the right thing to do is to clean up Vlad’s mess and get this fucking baby raised, one way or another.”

“Also,” Tucker adds, “I don’t think I’d be able to forgive myself if I had to wonder nightly if you were ok or if you made it for another day while I got to have nice things like a routine or a day job.”

“Yeah, what he said.”

“We are not above hunting you down ourselves.” Tucker says seriously.

Danny’s eyes became suspiciously glassy as he sniffs. “You guys are literally the best friends in the world.”

“We’re your only friends.”

Danny gives a small smile as Sam pulls out her half-ponytail, brushes it with her fingers, and puts it back up. “Anyway, if we run away, before anybody knows or figures out Danny’s powers, they’ll never find us. We’d still be hiding from the police and detectives, but that’s small potatoes compared to what we’re used to. Even if they suspect that we’re possessed by ghosts or think that Phantom is behind everything, they still won’t know the full range of Danny’s abilities and that will give us the advantage we need.”

Danny’s smile fades and his features sharpen into one of concentration. “That just leaves us figuring out how to raise a baby, avoid the law, where to go, and how we’re going to pay for everything.”

“If I can hack into high security government websites, a multi-billionaires personal accounts, the streetlights, and a ghosts tech-suit. I’m sure I can whip out some fake ID’s at the library and manage some tax invasion.”

“I have some money saved,” Sam adds, “It won’t last for long, but it’ll give use the head start we need.

“… We can go anywhere.” Said Danny, eyes gleaming and wide. “We destroy Vlad’s and my parent’s portals, keeping Amity safe, and we can go anywhere in the world. We can run to Rome or see the pyramids in Mexico.”

“Yeah,” Tucker says softly as he cradles the baby. “We can do that.”

We can’t keep calling her ‘the baby’ forever,” Sam says out of the blue. “She’s going to need a real name.”

“Dani?” Tucker shoots, eyebrow raised, “With, Screw it, Dani with an I?”

Neither Sam nor Danny seems to like it judging by their affronted frowns.

“That’ll work for now.” Danny says.

_7:04PM_

The last trace of Sam Manson, Tucker Folly, and Danny Fenton before their disappearance is in Vlad’s security footages where they’re walking out of the mansion with an odd bundle in Sam’s hands. They aren’t seen for many years after that, with the exception of an odd photo here and there.

Just as they hoped.

**Author's Note:**

> For @nerdneeniya on Tumblr, with the Dp trading board! Featuring a fic where Danielle is a baby instead of a ready made 13 year old.


End file.
